Tag Archives: Programs

I’m asked all the time, “What finally made you decide to solve your weight problem?” as if it didn’t bother me being overweight for 25 years. The truth is that I sincerely wanted to solve my problem when I was 12! But I wasn’t successful until 20 years later. It took me that long to learn what I needed in order to be successful.

Wanting, even with all your heart, to lose weight does not make it happen, as anyone with a stubborn weight problem knows.

Hopefully, it won’t take you 20 years to learn what I learned. You can learn it from me!

For my first 30 years, I was overweight and out of control, more than 300 pounds as an adult. Only in my early 30s was I finally able to succeed, losing 140 pounds and becoming my ideal body weight. I’ve maintained it handily since. Now I help other people and I wrote a book, now an eBook and an audiobook, about what I eventually learned that made me successful. Here are a few of the most important things, five key requirements to make 2017 the year you solve your weight problem for good:

1) You must make it the priority in your life.

You need to decide that being healthy in body, mind and spirit is more important than anything else and that your weight problem must be solved. Losing weight must become your No. 1 one concern. More important than your job. More important than your favorite pastimes, clubs, hobbies or comforts. You must become like a zealot who forsakes all else, a soldier in the field where losing this battle means losing everything. Nothing else can stand in the way of doing what you need in your effort to solve your weight problem.

Some may criticize this as being unreasonable and off-centered. I understand their criticism, but for most of us, this is one of those things where you will not make it unless you are totally devoted. To enjoy all of those other things you cherish, you’ve got to get this right. Nothing less than total dedication will do. It’s like wanting to make it to the top in a music, sports or business career. Nothing else can get in the way of doing what you need to do to succeed. It cannot take a back seat to anything else, cast aside when something else “comes up” as if it were more important. Controlling your weight is more important.

2) You must respect the science that tells us that we need to eat fewer calories than we burn to lose weight. We must accept the fact that we need to develop habits where we consistently eat within our caloric “budget” to keep it off.

There is no mystery to the science of weight control. It has not changed in eons. Eat too many calories and you get fat. Eat fewer than you burn and you burn it off. Accepting this reality does not by itself solve the problem, but there is no hope until you do. Hoping for a way around this fact will prevent you from ever succeeding. There is no way around this, no magic pill or surgery that will relieve you of having to limit your caloric intake. Fight this reality and you’ll never succeed. Accept it, and you’re on the path to success. In over 20 years, I have never had a client not lose weight when they eat the way I teach them.

3) You must learn how to train your mind to program yourself and master your habits, desires, impulses and feelings. The idea that your behavior and feelings are a matter of just making up your mind or wanting it badly enough is a fallacy. We are not born with well-developed “will power” and conscious control over the things that go on in our mind and body. In fact, most of what goes on is unconscious and a product of conditioning and programming that we were not even aware of. Habits and impulses were not chosen and they can seem to have a life of their own beyond your control. However, you can learn the programming and conditioning techniques discovered in behavioral and cognitive psychology as well as the ideo-dynamic phenomena that hypnotherapies use. The techniques I teach in my method are not unknown to science and behavioral medicine, but we are not born knowing them. They must be learned.

4) Make your goal the development of new permanent habits, rather than weight loss. Don’t focus so much on pounds but rather on the way you are living.

The most common approach to weight loss is doing something out of the ordinary for a while, like eating a special diet or going on an exercise crusade, and then going back to “normal” after a while. This is self-defeating. Even if we lose the weight we want, the “normal” that we have learned is what makes people fat, so we’ll just put it back on.

We are suckers for these diets and schemes because usually, we don’t want to change our habits. We are fond of doing the things we do, snacking the way we do, enjoying our favorite foods and restaurants and not having to think about it. We don’t want to give those things up. We’ve tried and we couldn’t do it or it was so miserable we gave up the idea.

However, we don’t have to give up enjoying food. In fact, one of the keys of reprogramming is that the new behavior must be satisfying. I enjoy food now more than I did when I was overweight. I eat all my favorite foods, don’t deny myself any food I really want, and enjoy it more. However, it is different than the way I used to eat. But just wanting and “willing” yourself to change habits is not the way it’s done. There are reprogramming techniques you need to use. The first step is to realize that our goal needs to be a change in our habitual behavior. When that happens, the weight comes off automatically. Focusing on weight loss instead of a change in yourself and your habits will not work.

5) You must be honest and sincere. I used to say things like “no matter what I do, I can’t lose weight.” That’s crazy of course. If I somehow got myself to eat very little, I’d lose weight. If I kept it up long enough, I’d starve to death. People who don’t have food in the Sudan are not fat. I was telling myself nonsense, lying to myself.

I used to say, “This won’t matter” if I cheated or “I just don’t care anymore” when my self-control flagged. Neither was really true. Everything counts. When I got discouraged and caved, I cried “uncle” and gave up in that moment, but I never stopped caring. I never stopped hating obesity and wanting something better. I still cared. Saying, “It doesn’t matter” was a lie.

Behavioral science teaches us that what we say to ourselves affects how we feel and how we act in an almost magical or mystical way. When we tell ourselves this nonsense, we are literally programming ourselves to overeat and become overweight, just as if we were using hypnotherapy to gain weight. When we say, “I just can’t lose weight,” we are using cognitive therapy techniques to make ourselves feel hopeless and depressed and self-hypnosis to unconsciously sabotage any efforts to succeed.

Changing the way we think and talk is essential to reversing obesity. Getting honest and serious, truly sincere about what we want, is one of the most important keys.

So, what do you think? Can you say, “yes” to these five key requirements? If you can’t, and you are a person who has been overweight and unable to fix it, you now know where you need to start to make changes. We are not going to solve this problem by accident. We need to be very intentional and meet these requirements. If you meet them now, you are on the path to success. That’s progress! Follow me.

In a recentarticlepublished by Vice Media’s website, the headline asks, “Is Vaping Actually the Secret to Weight Control?” — It looks like a weight loss ad on Google News. Could it be true? In a word – NO!

Vaping may be better than smoking, but it is one problem swapped for another, not a solution, to cancer risk or weight loss.

Any smoker who has blown smoke through a handkerchief knows the crap you are putting into your lungs when you smoke. I hope you have seen the results, the tar build up, the eventualCOPD (Chronic Obstructive Lung Disease) and possible lung cancer that comes from smoking. Certainly, it seems to me that if one could stop smoking with an alternative way to ingest nicotine, the addictive chemical in cigarettes, it would be a big improvement. Logic tells me that one would be better off without all that tar in the lungs, the cause of the COPD and likely contributor to cancer. However, other means of nicotine delivery also cause cancer, so continuing the addiction without the smoke may be an improvement, but it is not the answer to good health, not to mention the freedom from addiction. Only ending the smoking addiction offers that. And only changes in yourself —your habits, thinking and feelings about food, will result in solving your weight problem.

Why would anyone think that vaping would be an answer to weight control?

It has long been thought that smoking helps with weight control. Smokers have found that quitting smoking leads to weight gain. Research points to evidence of that. But does smoking really help solve a person’t weight problem? No.

The connection between smoking and weight became evident when researchers observed that people commonly gained weight when they quit smoking. The usual weight gain is 5 to 10 pounds in the first few months after quitting, but some gain much more, as much as 50 pounds after quitting. Some of the weight gain is thought to be from a decreased metabolic rate because the stimulative effect of nicotine is no longer present. However, most of the weight gain is due to switching from grabbing a cigarette to grabbing a snack when the urge strikes. The stressors of life triggered the need to inhale something to relieve the stress, and instead of smoke, it became food.

In addition to those findings, women who had become stress or emotional eaters have found that if they substituted lighting up for grabbing a snack, they could avoid a lot of the overeating that caused their weight problems. For them, smoking seemed like the answer to their problem of gaining weight.

However, the reality is that when you develop a habit of overeating, you are going to end up overweight, even if you smoke or vape. Habits develop and strengthen over time, and overeating habits will grow, whether you vape/smoke or not, unless you learn how to master your eating addiction.

Smoking or vaping is not the answer to weight loss and weight control. Only permanent change in yourself, your habits, thinking and feelings about food will achieve that.

Quitting smoking led me to learn how to lose weight. Weight loss can be solved, but not by smoking or vaping.

I referred to an eating addiction, and while many may question that idea, those who have struggled with self-control with their eating know exactly what I’m talking about. The idea that we easily just decide to eat less, using will-power, and then succeed instantly, is a fallacy for most people. That’s why we have an obesity epidemic with over 70% of Americans overweight. And adding vaping or smoking to your eating habits will not make you less of an addict. You’ll then be addicted to both vaping or smoking and overeating!

I am a Licensed Mental Health Counselor specializing in weight loss and addictions, and I got my start in the field with smoking cessation therapy. I was an obese heavy smoker who managed to become an ex-smoker with effective addiction therapy. In my training as an addictions counselor I became aware that my problem with being overweight was really a problem with overeating, similar to other addictions, like smoking. In 1984, using proven behavioral therapy, I lost 140 pounds, and have kept it off since. That led me to the program I now offer all over the world through my network of therapists and my book, The Anderson Method. Believe me, smoking or vaping is not your solution to weight control.

Weight loss and weight control is achieved via changes in yourself, not by will-power, but through “psychotherapy.”

The term “psychotherapy” today usually refers to formal clinical counseling with a psychotherapist. However, I’m using it here in original meaning of the root words, psyche (mind), and therapy (healing). To lose weight permanently, we need to make improvements in our mental processes, our automatic thoughts, habits and feelings, so that we habitually take in fewer calories than we burn. And we need to make it permanent, for the rest of our lives. That means we have to change that part of ourselves, our unconscious mind, that controls our habits, automatic thinking, urges and even feelings. Right now, your unconscious mind is probably set up to make you overeat, no matter how much you’d like to change. Deciding you want to be different and feel different is not enough. Trying to use “will-power” is not enough. Something else is in charge, something like an addiction, and the only way to change that is with the healing of your mind. “Will-power” only comes into play in deciding to learn how to accomplish that, learning the techniques.

So, realize that wanting to change yourself is certainly a big step towards self-improvement, maybe the biggest step, but it is only the first step. You need to learn how. And that’s what my book and lots of other self-help books can teach you about self-improvement and personal growth.

“Thank you, Mr. Anderson. A little over a year ago I received your book as a gift. It changed my life! One year later, I've lost 115lbs and that number is growing. Thank you for helping me change my view of not only food but of myself!”

Lisa McClure

To order the book or read or play a free sample, click the image below!